NOT BEAUTY
And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.”
Title card from the 1933 film King Kong
THE BEAST THAT’S DEAD being art as a solitary, and often tragic, effort as “fine” art now is wholly a socio-economic—business over beauty—project. OK, it wasn’t always an artist as solitary genius thing; in fact that definition is relatively new. People have been making what we call art (beautiful, but useless save that, things) for more than 40,000 years and only in the most recent half a millennium has the artist’s individual creativity mattered much, and only in the latter half of that has his or her plans and wishes mattered more than those of commissioner of the art.
As well as that, I’m also saying that we project on our current mindset back in time and put in the heads of artists and their employers thoughts, motives and emotions which we have no idea that they ever really had. For example, we see Michelangelo (Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet,1475-1564) as a rebel genius when his contemporaries most likely saw him as not more than a competent and successful craftsman who was a real asshole most of the time. But can you imagine The Agony And The Ecstasy written about an in-demand, but anti-social plumber? Probably not.
Before the European Renaissance (c.1500 CE) there was a look and artists were crafters who worked real hard to do that look best. The look, of course, changed over time, but it did so slowly and since the work was mostly anonymous we can’t give any one artist credit for creativity or innovation. Not what they would have sought such celebrity, they probably would have denied it, being different then—unlike now in modernist and postmodernist times—came with job-losing if not life-threatening consequences.
So being different, being avant garde, being a bad-boy celebrity became cool. The point-zero-one-percenters all wanted “Mike the Man” or other rebels to work for them because they were different. Such works came with serious bragging rights and the rich and powerful, then as now, were willing to pay big bucks for those.
What caused the change in the arts was the change in society where the individual became the center of it all rather than society. You now were, at least in theory, a person first, then a tooth on a gear in the machine of your culture, not the other way around, as it had been forever before. It didn’t happen all at once or everywhere, and it still hasn’t finished, in fact we see much back sliding all the time. But for a while, the artist as rebel was a king. As kings are usually the antithesis of rebels there is some irony here.
He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive — a show to gratify your curiosity.”
King Kong impresario Carl Denham
In Artworld, what began with “Mike the (Renaissance) Man” and his rivals peaked around 1910 with “Pablo the Perfect” and his modernist gang. The about 50 yrs after that, the major-league artists had taken the Rebel Genius thing as far as it could go. They had run out of traditions to rebel against. They began to rebel against themselves. They began to self-destruct.
So now what were they to do? They still had bar tabs, loft rents and pricey muses to pay. They needed to find something new to sell to their fans who were hooked on the new. Irony came to their rescue. Why not sell non-art as the new art? Sell kitsch as haute, mass produced as bespoke, and comic as serious? Rebel against rebelling? The post-modernists decided that to beat the rich, they had to join them.
And lo, it wasn’t beauty that killed the beast, it was the airplanes—private jets actually—after all.
